In the Ashes of a Broken Bottle

I drink the same silence that killed my father

I piss it, I sweat it, I spit it on the ground

It rises up from the buried blankness, up

through bowel and gland and throat…bitter

to taste, even after expelled it haunts me,

a lingering bite on my leaden tongue.

With the stringy end of a long oak branch, I

gently blend the silvery bubbles into the rusty dust

muddy pocks popping in the afternoon heat.

If I had Your strength I would bend down

and glean a Pantokrator finger-full and accept 

the paste between my own chapped lips.

Loosening my tongue of stone, I would speak.

With the words of drunken sailors and ecstatic

poets,  I would tell the truth.  I would be able to tell

you that I love you, I would be able to bless you.

Perhaps I would pray agonizing pleas or sing

psalms of ascent to melodies I’ve never heard played.

But my back is stiff and stalwart, a mast on a windless

day, fabric slack on these dry bones:  doldrums.

I am parched with a hoary thirst…in the stalemate

the questions come:

How does one slake a throat this dry?

Are rivers of eternal life wide enough,

deep enough to flood back into time’s

lack? How can I speak to the rock,

when I can’t even say my own name?

I am unable to get down to the filthy water, when

the surface is stirred, before the sun burns it away.

And so I stand, licking the end of the spindly oak stick,

wondering why miracles taste so ordinary and bland.

Remembering the days when I could neither walk nor

stand, the long night of sightlessness and how cold it

was being dead. Now, waiting to speak doesn’t seem

so bad — in the mean time I will think of something to say.

I am going

I am going to say that I am proud

of you, but I don’t want you to ask me

“for what?”

I am going to say that I love

you, but I don’t want you to ask me

“why?”

I am going to say that I am leaving

but I don’t want you to ask me

“when?”

Then, I am going to say that I will never

 leave you, but I don’t want you to ask me

“how?”

And when you ask,

and I know that you have not heard the first or the last,

I will pause on the first step up the staircase 

and I will want to ask

“why?”

Instead, I will turn toward you

and smile, taking the cold glass of nightshade,

wet with condensation, from your hand

and drink it deliberately. 

And I will say I love you

and how proud I am of you

as I leave,

suddenly

limp and lifeless at the bottom of the stairs.  

           —

     —

—

And as the morning light climbs past the step where I stopped going,

as the shadows are conquered by the sun’s sentient gaze,

my body will be gone, but it will be the only thing missing

and left unsaid for now.

Note to self:  for the times I forget

It is easier to read than write,

far more pleasant to follow

the thoughts of another’s pen

than to decided which words

belong and which have no

meaning on the page.  To make

your mind up is to be alive. The pale

death of not writing is a numbing

coming gently at first, zeal

leeching down through each shovel-full

of stopping, not beginning. 

However, if the book or poem or play is good, there is risk of ravenous treason in the sharp pages resting on your wrists, they will betray you to the flames once

thought wet enough, doused thoroughly enough to impede orange resurrection.  Such insipid flickering brings heat enough to dry Elijah’s flooded stones, a fire from within, indistinguishably from above.  Unreservedly, you will find yourself dancing while the prophets of lies are slaughtered

marveling miraculously

as blankness is consumed,

licked up...leaving

something where

there was nothing to speak of. 

It is easier to read than write,

but read nonsense, lest you think

at all and imagine the world’s edges

flapping out of control, a screeching

hawk tumbling sparrows in the wind

coming for to blind you with madness.

Read drivel to blanket all passion with

wet weight of passivity, a hazy warmth,

not hot nor cold, nothing shocking or bright.

However, if the play or novel is so bad that you know you can do better, convinced

with the turning of every limp and flaccid leaf of your fate…feeling the fabric

of salvation hemming itself to the soles of your feet, like Pan’s shadow.  Suddenly

you will find yourself preferring the icy awkwardness of Isaiah’s nakedness, shivering out words on tree bark and across the bare spread of skins, writing to undo writing…

diluting the decomposed

alphabet with slender

green shoots, precise

arrows of ink, ruins being undone

like a seed consumed

for the sake of the roots.

Burn me, do not bore me. 

Writer’s Haiku

Six beggars waiting,

sunlight pooling in their hands,

hungering for words.